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OK, Sometimes you stumble onto things that are just not right. On my own personal set of hardware (independent from the Server with the IBM Raid card) I am still running Tests with the Mtron flash drives. I noticed a huge regression in performance late this week from earlier in the week. In fact it was truely head scratching. DBT2 results that were in the 26K TPM range suddenly dropped to 4K TPM.I hate to admit a big screw up, but my tests towards the end of the week were tainted. While investigating the problem with the IBM Raid Card and XFS, I took one of the Mtron drives and rebuilt it with XFS. The benchmarks (sysbench) showed that on my hardware their was little performance difference. When I resumed my Mtron dbt2 benchmarks the mtron drive that housed the log files was indeed on this xfs drive.

Trying to figure out what was going on I noticed this (sde is the log drive, sdd is the data ):

A company has come up with a vendor-neutral database certification exam. Some are wondering how much use this will be, as it doesn’t go into vendor-specificities. Now, the specifics of how a query optimizer handles queries, how backups, restores and security are done and with MySQL specifically, how different storage engines act are [...]

There has been plenty of press this week regarding Microsoft making a bid for Yahoo. This week the Wall Street Journal Article From Uncertain Future To Leading Yahoo Bid has prompted me to the following observations. I quote several points:

The bid, he said on the call, is “the next major milestone in Microsoft’s companywide transformation” to incorporate online services.

as Microsoft pushes the bid and, if successful, tries to meld Yahoo with Microsoft.

Microsoft had been negotiating to buy online ad company DoubleClick Inc. but lost that deal to Google, which paid $3.1 billion. Microsoft in May countered, spending $6 billion on online ad company aQuantive Inc.

While Microsoft should continue investing in its own online services, it …

I read yesterday in The Wall Street Journal an interesting article in Personal Technology, “Solid-state drives challenge hard drives in speed, but not value”. While the title does sum up nothing new, the barrier to entry to embracing new technology is always cost, and early adopters may not have deeper pockets, but it’s also about being a alpha geek.

As the article states “Solid-state drives have some key advantages. Because that lack moving parts, they are faster, draw less power, and harder to damage and are quieter”. It also backed this up with some results.

What I did not realize, is the new MacBook Air has a 80GB HHD version at $1,799 and as 64G SSD version at $2,798. Testing showed that there was little difference in battery life between these models, however with the …

Fotolog is seeking a MySQL DBA. You'll be working with me in a fast-paced, small-team-running-a-very-large-scale environment.

About Fotolog.com:
? 14th most trafficked site (Alexa)
? 3rd most active social network (ComScore)
? Parent company: Hi-Media (France)


Duties
? Work with Director of Database Infrastructure to maintain/improve and support a high traffic, fine-tuned, scalable and reliable database environment on a day-to-day basis.
? Pro-active and reactive performance analysis, monitoring, troubleshooting and resolution of issues.
? Optimize and tune contentions within the database environment
? Create logging environment(s) to log usage statistics about the environment
? Regularly monitor and periodically conduct random tests of restoration from backups generated within the environment
? Participate in large storage engine migrations
? …

Yup, Yahoo! has finally decided to show balls and reject Microsoft's bid.

Thinking just from search point of view, a Microsoft-Yahoo merger is less evil for the search economy (and by extension online economy) than a Yahoo-Google deal. Of course, this is based on my biased view.

Update: I wonder how long before YHOO drop back to their pre-Microsoft-bid levels.

Update 2: …

The official MySQL Drink. How to make it:
Continue reading "Salmiakki - the official MySQL Drink"

thnx Christophe

Few months back we noticed the incompatibility change related to MyISAM that was introduced in 4.1.23 and recent 5.0 and 5.1 MySQL versions which breaks when one wants to upgrade to 4.1.23 or latest 5.0 or 5.1 when the MyISAM or Merga table is created with 4.0 or earlier 4.1 version.

I reported a bug to MySQL team way back; and looks like they now pushed a patch to 5.1.

This happens even with Merge tables and looks like merge tables are overlooked in that bug report and I am not 100% sure if the patch fixes the merge table issue. This bug is triggered only when the MyISAM table is created with a key column and Merge is associated with …